Thursday, June 2, 2011

The writer returns to the country of her birth, only to have her illusions met by hard reality.

Our family was lucky. Or at least that’s
what my parents told me, over and over again. “We got out of Cuba just
in time.” First my mother, with my two siblings and me in 1960. Then my
father, shortly before the revolutionaries appropriated the family
business. My grandmother waited the longest, emigrating the following
summer. She left her husband behind, forever as it turned out. He stayed
in Havana to take care of a younger brother who had been imprisoned by
Castro’s regime for “collaborating with the CIA.”

After I married
and had children of my own, I began dreaming of returning to Cuba. My
situation was complicated, though. First, because I am now a U.S.
citizen. Second, because both sides of my family had been part of the
hated bourgeoisie before the Cuban revolution and had openly opposed
Fidel Castro.

I called my uncle in Washington, D.C., for advice.
He’d been the mayor of Havana and ambassador to the United States under
former president Ramón Grau. He discouraged me from going, warning that
it would not be safe for any member of our family to return. My father
agreed. He knew Fidel well — he had crossed paths with him every day in
the hallways of their private Jesuit high school. “He was a bully then,”
he said, his face darkening, “and he is a paranoid bully now. You might
get in, but you might not get out.” Still, one afternoon, he drew a map
of Havana with an engineer’s precision and carefully marked a
half-dozen places of interest in red pencil: the family business, our
home in Havana, my grandparents’ houses.

My maternal grandmother
lived with us in New Jersey after she emigrated. One summer morning,
she patted a spot beside her and told me a secret. Just before she fled
Cuba, she whispered conspiratorially, she had hired a master carpenter
to hide a few precious belongings under the staircase of her home. A box
of photographs. A bundle of letters. Family heirlooms, nestled in
velvet and gold-brocade drawstring pouches. “Si regresas a La Habana,”
my grandmother concluded, squeezing my hands too tightly, “If you make
it back to Havana . . . promise me, Ali, that you will go to my house
and get my things.”

Twice, in my 30s and again in my 40s, I
wrote letters and submitted applications for entry as a visiting
journalist. I didn’t get very far, and I set aside my dream — until my
eldest brother died unexpectedly, at age 51. He was cremated, and we
scattered his ashes in the Atlantic Ocean hoping the sea would carry him
to Cuba, his homeland. As the dark clot of cremains dissipated in the
lapping waves, the familiar longing rose in me. Suddenly, nothing seemed
more important than returning to Cuba.

I quit my publishing job of 27 years. I found a new job in education that qualified me to conduct research in Cuba.

I
spent long hours online and on the phone investigating potential
itineraries. Finally, on the off chance that I’d satisfy both countries’
requirements for legal travel, I paid a well-connected Cuban travel
agent to process a thick stack of forms and documents.

It was
madness, but it worked. At the 11th hour, I received a phone call from
the agent, who told me she was holding in her hands the Cuban
government’s entry permit. She was as surprised as I was. “The Cuban
officials must not have looked closely at your application. You’re very
lucky.”

Three weeks later, on Aug. 1, 2009, I stood in line at
Miami International Airport with a lively group of Cuban families
waiting to board a chartered flight to Havana. The minute our plane
lifted off the runway, the passengers broke out in applause. Flushed
with excitement, my seatmate said, “Life is very, very hard in Cuba, but
we miss it terribly all the same. There is no more beautiful place on
Earth.”

At José Martí airport in Havana, I breezed through the
H1N1 screening line, customs line and luggage tax line. As I approached
the fourth and final line, I eyed the exit. “Wait!” the official I’d
handed my declaration card to commanded. “What is this?” A hairy index
finger stabbed the line where I’d written “U.S. citizen.”

“I have my passport right here,” I stammered, confused by his tone. “I can show it to —”

“No!”
he barked. Then he theatrically shredded the declaration card and
called over another official to cover his post. When he led me away to a
private area of the airport, I panicked. But he simply whipped out a
fresh form and helped me fill it out “correctly.”

“Look, your U.S. citizenship does not mean anything here,” he explained. Eres cubana, entiendes? “You
are Cuban, got it? You might have a house and some official papers in
America, but you will always be Cuban. That is what you must write
here.”

I expected smooth sailing from then on. I was wrong. As I
stepped outside the airport into suffocating heat, I found myself, like
Alice in Wonderland, mystified by the strange, new world I’d tumbled
into. Only this was no wonderland.

The experiences of the next
seven days were deeply disorienting. When I told the cab driver my
destination was the Hotel Habana Libre, he said bitterly, “I am not
welcome in your hotel, because I am dark-skinned. The government thinks
tourists are more comfortable around light-skinned people. Even when my
relatives from America come for a visit and stay here, I am not allowed
to go up to their room.”

I was genuinely surprised. Given that
Cuba’s population is over 50 percent black and the government prides
itself on equality and the common good, I thought race relations would
be better. I asked the driver if this hotel was an exception. He snorted
and bounced the cab over a curb and into the hotel’s circular driveway.

Still, nothing could dampen my spirits. I was here! And I was
about to enter the famed “Havana Hilton,” as the hotel was originally
christened. My father’s first cousin launched his career as an architect
here, designing one of the grand ballrooms. My young parents had
strolled through the magnificent lobby, undoubtedly admiring the
three-storey atrium. I was born in April 1958, just one month after the
grand opening. Perhaps I had walked through these very doors myself as a
toddler.

But as I approached the main entrance, I tensed.
Uniformed guards flanked the doorway. Plainclothes police with poorly
hidden earpieces moved silently through the lobby. Glancing around as I
waited in line to register, I spotted the cold eye of a surveillance
camera tucked among plastic foliage.

Never far from watchful
eyes, I followed the pre-approved itinerary exactly. I attended canned
lectures, toured designated schools and interviewed teachers and
university professors for my “research project.” I learned little of any
consequence in these government-sponsored venues. A few hours online
would have been more fruitful.

It was not easy to access the
Internet, though, even in the hotel. Guests had to turn over their
passports to the computer-room clerk before using the shared computers,
and the Internet connection was extremely slow. Phone calls were
monitored, too, in the glass-enclosed booths of the hotel telephone
centre, where a helpful operator dialed all calls and, I’m told,
listened in.

Some days, though, the itinerary allowed for a few
unscheduled and unsupervised hours to rest or shop. On these days, I
quickly changed into a simple housedress and sandals and struck out
alone. It was these solitary excursions — and the spontaneous encounters
they occasioned — that made my visit worthwhile. I walked slowly,
taking in the rich colours and scents of royal purple bougainvillea,
blood-red hibiscus and the fiery blossoms of framboyan trees, and
greeting the Cubans squatting in doorways and loitering in storefronts,
striking up random conversations. A surprising number were friendly and
willing to talk, to tell their stories.

It’s true, these Cubans
told me, that the government provides free health care and education.
Every Cuban has a roof over his head and food on her table. But since
the 1990s and the fall of the Soviet Union, the shortages in medicine,
housing and food have eroded confidence in the regime. “It got so bad,”
one woman told me in a hushed voice, “little children got horrible
diseases. Some people became blind, and some people” — she formed a
noose with a hand cupped around her neck — “you know. They just gave
up.”

A Cuban lawyer complained about the lack of access to world
news. “How many channels can you watch in your hotel?” he asked me with
boyish curiosity. He peppered me with questions about U.S. President
Barack Obama, the American economy and our education system. The
popularity of a half-dozen Cuban bloggers and Raúl Castro’s promise to
make the Internet and mobile phones more accessible had led me to
believe that information from the outside world was seeping into Cuba.
But my casual acquaintances howled with laughter when I asked if they
had mobile phones. “I can’t afford eggs for my children or a tin can of
paint for my house,” one said. “Those things are only for the military
and high officials.”

One rainy day, an elderly woman invited me inside her kitchen for a cup of café cubano.
Spotting a crucifix above the table, I asked her about religious
practice in the country. “It is easier now,” she told me, “but if you
are young it can prevent you from getting a good job.” She hesitated,
then blurted: “My pastor was killed two weeks ago.”

“Oh, no. What
happened?” I asked. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair and twisted a
corner of the floral tablecloth. “It was an attempted robbery,” she
said finally, avoiding eye contact. I stopped asking questions.

One
experience was lighter, if no less sobering. I joined a busload of
tourists on a day trip to the countryside. Our destination was a
post-revolutionary Cuban community with an impressive array of social
services, a well-equipped community centre and sparkling white-washed
bungalows dotting the forested hillside. At the model home near the end
of our tour, I hung back to thank the family who’d so kindly greeted us.
“It must be difficult for you with all us tourists traipsing through
your house every day,” I said in Spanish. The grandmother exchanged a
furtive glance with her daughter and nodded. “How long have you lived
here?” I asked. She answered vaguely, “A while.” When she learned I was
born in Cuba, she invited me to join her and her daughter for coffee in a
back room. “We don’t really live here,” her daughter offered as I
sipped the sweet espresso. “It’s a great job, but our real house is five
minutes away. We come here every day for the tourists. Anyway, we’re
lucky to be able to live in this community. The government keeps it nice
for the tourists. There’s a waiting list to get in.”

Halfway
through my visit, I abandoned the idea of retrieving my grandmother’s
possessions. Not only because it would be impossible to gain admittance
to her former home, which sat squarely in the capital’s Embassy Row, but
also because my romantic daydreams had been impaled by the real and
present desperation of the Cuban people. I had not travelled to Cuba
expecting to see the paradise of my parents’ memories, of course, but I
had hoped that things would be better for the average Cuban. Life still
seemed impossibly hard here.

As I sat at the gate in José Martí
airport waiting for the charter plane that would carry me back to the
United States, I couldn’t help wondering: How much has really changed in
Cuba? The military and high-ranking government officials are Cuba’s new
bourgeoisie, indifferent to the suffering of their fellow citizens. We
tourists and researchers are kept in the dark, steered toward upscale
resorts, hotels, restaurants and shops that few Cubans can enter, much
less patronize. We visit Potemkin villages erected for our benefit, and
our dollars line the pockets of the privileged.

On the last day
of my visit, an American university professor and socialist sympathizer
said, “Every year I visit Cuba hoping that things will be better. This
is my sixth visit.” He and I discussed how U.S. policy helped cripple
Cuba’s economy and isolate its citizens. In the previous week, I had
asked several officials and as many ordinary Cubans some variation of
the question, “What should I tell Americans about Cuba and the Cuban
people?” Some responded that I should tell Americans about the Cuban
people’s ingenuity, resiliency and national pride despite the country’s
troubles; others spoke of the Cuban people’s keen sense of humour and
achievements in the arts and sciences. But everyone, absolutely
everyone, repeated one particular message: Tell the American people to
lift the blockade, not just for economic reasons, but for the sake of intercambio — the human exchange that inevitably leads to mutual transformation.

By Alicia von StamwitzAlicia von Stamwitz was born Alicia Ramirez de Arellano. She lives in St. Louis.